US-based chipmaker Qualcomm said that some of its original equipment partners (OEMs) would like to bring 5G-ready smartphones in 2018 itself in line with some global telcos’ plan to launch 5G services. In an interaction with ET’s Danish Khan, Qualcomm’s Durga Prasad Malladi, Senior Vice President of Engineering talks about the company’s focus on the 5G technology-related advancements, 5G smartphones and fixed wireless. Edited excerpts

What sort of 5G-related development is happening within Qualcomm?

I am responsible for all our wireless research, so that includes 5G. One year back, we had set ourselves a mission of making sure that commercialization occurs in 2019 time-frame and there were three things that were necessary to make sure that this happens. The first thing was to make sure that the specifications for 5G are completed in time. And that was a pretty huge effort, spearheaded by Qualcomm, and we managed to take our entire ecosystem- all the partners with us. And in the standards process, there was a huge milestone in December of last year, when the first phase of what is called as a ‘non-standalone mode’ was completed. We also started working with all our infrastructure partners with equipment based upon the specifications 5G NR, nothing proprietary, it’s all 5G NR specification.

The specifications are real, and are mature enough for us to do this sort of interoperability testing. That’s a pretty big milestone from our perspective, especially when you step back in time and see where we were one year back. Moving forward, what we see is, this year we are going to be heavily involved in terms of actual devices and equipment out there on feet, doing pre-commercial and commercial trials, leading into commercialization in 2019. Some operators in fact have gone on the record and stated that they would like to commercialize in late 2018 itself. We are doing everything that we can, to help them. We recently announced a large number of device OEMs, who are working with us on making sure that there are devices out there by the time these operators actually launch. The momentum is very clear behind 5G- operators are making their plans, every single discussion that you see and all the announcements that you see from operators, indicates that they are preparing their networks for 5G for all their launches, whether it’s late 2018 or early 2019. It’s a pretty big thing for us. Lots of work ahead of us but we feel quite happy to be where we are, at this point in time.

When it comes to the development of smartphones, how soon could these smartphones hit the market?

Almost all the OEMs are preparing for 2019, starting from the early part of 2019. And depending upon the region, some of them are more aggressive than that and they would like to do that in late 2018 itself.

Are OEMs looking at bringing 5G smartphones in the high-end segment only?

From our standpoint, we are doing our bit to make sure that they have the capabilities in their hand. How OEMs want to launch it is up to them. Some of it is also dependent upon what the operators want. Most of the operators who are launching in 2019 and have aggressive launch dates, are using non-standalone mode capability, which means you are building off LTE, which is already close to a gigabit capability; in fact, more than that. You are starting off with non-standalone mode, which is at a gigabit and so the question then is- on 5G NR what should be the data rate capability that you want. And typically, from most of the operators, they are all talking of, they haven’t yet decided everything but they all like the fact that they can go anywhere from 1 to 4.5gb per sec depending upon which band they are operating in. They are thinking through all of that right now. Almost all of them are looking at everything is in the order of gigabits. So, the question is of- is it 2gb or its 4gb- that is something that they actually are thinking through. But from our perspective, we are supporting them all way.

For a country like India, when do you think 5G could be a reality?

It depends on the government in India and which bands are going to be allocated for 5G. So once that situation becomes clear, as to what’s the time frame associated with that, then we will have a better sense. But on the other hand, if you take a look at the LTE capability today, let’s take an example of AT&T and Verizon, both have them deployed LAA, regardless of how much licensed spectrum they have, they’ve already started incorporating the unlicensed spectrum as a part of their plans. That makes it a little easier to achieve Gigabit speeds even though you might not have enough spectrum because with LAA even if you have 20MHz of license spectrum, you can still offer Gigabit speeds as long as you actually incorporate LAA. So that’s probably one of the parts of the puzzle as well, even for the 4G network evolution.

Other than smartphones, which are the other form factors or devices with 5G capability that would hit the market?

One of the promises of 5G is that even for mobile broadband it’s not relegated just to smartphones. It’s something that’s intended for any device that consumes a large volume of data. So, for instance, it could be tablets, could be connected laptops that are a big part of our initiative. We’ve talked a lot about it in terms of Snapdragon enabled laptops. The idea is that if you take all the laptops today and if you have this very high-speed low-latency connectivity, then it enables you to rethink the way you think of how you do computing itself. When you have the capability of this very high speed and low latency network, and of course the ubiquity, so connectivity becomes an important thing. Once you have connectivity, doesn’t matter where your data is stored, you can actually fetch it whenever you want and at whatever speed that you really are comfortable with. And I think that’s going to be key for us. So, to answer that question- is it only for smartphones? Absolutely not; even for mobile broadband. It’s for smartphones, tablets, connected laptops, etc.

Which are the most prominent bands being considered for the 5G technology? Does Qualcomm support all bands through its modem technology?

You see a split between, when we say ‘sub6’, a lot of the initial traction on 5G was originally in 3.5 GHz. But if you kind of look at it from the operators’ standpoint and you follow the announcements made by, you can go to one extreme where T-Mobile, for instance, has made very clear that they would like to have FDD deployments with 5G in 600 MHz band and that’s the spectrum that they recently actually got from the auctions. Sprint has made announcements on their need for 5G deployment 2.6 GHz, what used to be called as band 41. And then you have bands 42 & 43, which was from 3.4-3.8 GHz- that’s predominantly in Europe, in Korea and in China. But then, if you take a look at Japan, then Japan also talks about 4.4-4.9 GHz, China also has a 4.8 GHz band. So, it’s not one single band, I mean, there are like several of these bands. From our standpoint, we are supporting all of those bands, I mean everything that is needed in the right time frame for the launches that are coming up.

So, the devices that will come will be multiband, like we have in 4G scenario?

That’s correct! I think that’s why for all these operators we made actual public announcements on that one, stating that we will support you in your launches. And of course, in millimeter wave band, it’s not just 28 GHz. In the US we have both 28 and 39 GHz bands and in Korea it’s predominantly 28 GHz, so even a millimeter wave is a multi-band device. It’s kind of important to understand that because in the US at least, it’s already multi-band.

There are multiple bands available, as you said. How different speed experience is going to be when it comes to the accessibility of 5G services across bands?

Not as much on peak rates, I mean in the sense that the massive MIMO and the beam forming techniques that are being used are pretty common between say 2.6, 3.5 and 4.8 GHz bands. What matters is how much is the bandwidth that’s getting allocated for 5G and the average user data rates with massive MIMO and beamforming. In most of these bands, usually it’s about 100 MHz per operator. Once you have that, then it’s the same 256 QAM same 4 layer MIMO, same beamforming technique. We believe that as long as the bandwidth is the same, by and large you shouldn’t see a huge variation in the peak user experience, for these bands- the 2.5, 3.5 and 4.5 GHz bands. The average user experience can be quite different due to usage of massive MIMO and beam forming techniques in 5G. Now, for millimeter wave on the other hand, we use 800 MHz of spectrum, but we use a lower order modulation; we use a 64 QAM there. But in spite of that, we actually get to 4 Gbps, so there it’s not so much on the difference between 28 and 39 GHz because the amount of bandwidth is the same. What matters is the ability to have a dense network, a very dense topology and then making sure that all the beam-steering and beam-switching algorithms are implemented in the network. And as long as you have that, the user experience is again pretty good.

Typically, when you think of a cellular network, one usually thinks that the inter-site distances are in the order of like hundreds of meters or 500m inter-site distance. In these hotspot areas, in places like San Francisco, the inter-site distance is actually less than 200m, sometimes even less that 150m- it’s actually pretty small. And when you add millimeter wave on top of that, it’s a perfect recipe. That’s why you see really good user experience. Basis our experiment we found that in that specific scenario, 50% of the users get something like 1.4 GB per second. That’s quite something! If in your phone 50% of the users actually get over 1 GB per second, it’s going to change the way that you do things and that’s the reason I’m no longer talking just of smartphones. Now think of your laptop or your tablet and most of the time it’s getting GHz of speed; your consumption is going to change quite dramatically.

Are there other elements for 5G technology that you are working on?

Yes, beyond mobile broadband, one of the promises of 5G was that it’s a very unifying connectivity fabric. Beyond being just a phrase, what we really meant by that is- if you take a look at everything wireless around you, cellular technology has evolved in a certain direction, but there are a lot of other areas where we can bring in wireless technology and the cellular experience into that domain. So as a part of that, one example of that is automation & manufacturing and industrial IoT. There’s a large amount of manufacturing equipment, as we talk to those who are working in this industry, so whether it’s GE or Bosch or Siemens and so on. If you go to a manufacturing plant, it’s a very cluttered environment, very dynamic environment and they use what is known as industrial ethernet, it’s a wire line capability and it works very well. But on the other hand, as they think of a far more flexible way of doing manufacturing, they are interested in seeing ‘can we actually replace that wire line ethernet with 5G NR? And by the way, I still want the same reliability. We are talking of precise motion control, down to a millisecond latency with very high reliability. Question is- can 5G NR do that? so, we’ve been working on that; that’s the second phase of 5G that’s coming up.

Similarly, LAA was a technology that we developed quite extensively, and as we are looking into what are the new ways of sharing spectrum, especially in the higher bands, we are bringing in new ways of doing it with spatial spectrum sharing concepts.

One of the use cases of 5G, as vendor say is going to be the fixed wireless in the market. Is it going to happen through a CPE kind of device?

So, a lot of the initial tests that were done with the millimeter wave were really focused on fixed wireless access and we were a part of those studies as well. Now, of course, what we are solving now and what we think we have solved is a far more complicated problem which is in a mobile hand-held. So, obviously if a technology works from a mobile standpoint, fixed wireless access is relatively, from a purely technology standpoint, simple. The problem there though is slightly different. It’s ‘okay, I might not have such a dense deployment and what I actually serve several homes at the same time.’ So, the same multi-user MIMOs, the same beam-steering techniques are going to be used over there. But, the idea is not to have out-to-in penetration using millimeter wave. Say, in another words -here’s my house, here’s my base station and here’s the user- you don’t want to have the base station talking directly to the user. In fact, the propagation losses tend to be pretty bad by the time you go from there. On the other hand, you can go from the base station to the house and then have some sort of a Wi-Fi mesh capability, which is another solution that we provide. That is one way of solving the problem. That’s actually something that we are seeing a lot of traction for.

Some operators like Verizon and so on have already made their public announcements of fixed wireless access, so we expect that to also happen.

In the 5G scenario, how the voice would be delivered?

Today, non-standalone mode does not mean that you fall back from 5G to 4G, you are simultaneously connected to both 4G and 5G. Just like your phone right now- it’s connected to a mobile operator and potentially it’s connected to a Wi-Fi network. That’s simultaneous connectivity, it’s not like one or the other. So, think of exactly the same thing between 4G and 5G. That’s what non-standalone mode is. In fact, it’s even tighter than that because both 4G and 5G are being offered by the same operator, so you have a situation wherein you have a single setup. So, I come up on a 4G network, my base station tells me ‘there’s a 5G network here, go do your measurements and come and tell me what you found’. So, you perform measurements, you report it back to the network and the network will add another 5G carrier on top. Simultaneously, you are connected to the 4G and you are connected to the 5G at the same time. So, if you get a voice call VoLTE would work perfectly fine in that case. For non-standalone mode, we believe that this is the way things will evolve.

Would there be a VoLTE equivalent of voice technology in the 5G scenario?

There will be, absolutely. There will be a Voice over NR as well. But I’m just saying that for non-standalone mode, to roll out initial rollouts actually VoLTE should be perfectly fine. Over time, there will be Voice over NR as well and that is a part of the standards process.